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Where the Global Warming Data Is
Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."
Regardless if global warming is a problem, we should ALL strive to lessen our effect on the environment. Restricting emissions that may not heat up the planet, BUT have noticeable problems on health of humans and wildlife. I feel like I have to remind people that even if global warming is false we should always do what we can to conserve our resources and lessen pollution.
This is just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue. If there was any substance to these email, they would've produced the evidence by now. A few sentences blown out of context from a few cherry picked emails are merely red-herring.
If climate scientists refuse to look at proprietary data on the grounds that they can't release it:
"They are cherry picking their data, the met data shows there is no cooling, it's all a fraud!!!"
If instead they decide to agree accept the offer to see it by signing a NDA:
"They don't release the data, they cover it up, it's all a conspiracy!!!!"
Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not. What the so called skeptics are arguing is that because SOME scientists decided the benefits of using more data outweigh the cons of being unable to disclose it, that means the entire field of climate science is a fraud. Never mind that their findings agree with research done with open data, never mind that you could in principle go sign an NDA yourself if you mistrust the CRU so badly. No it must all be a conspiracy, including the research that were made with open data that achieved the same conclusions.
The more I hear from climate "skeptics" the more the arguments feel similar to those of the evolution skeptics.
"The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Why would there be a cover-up in the first place? Much is reported in the news about it, who or why would you cover up data on Global warming? My opinion is that there is a cover-up because there is something to cover-up. It exists, "it" is the true cause of the Global warming, something that has been covered up since NASA discovered a rogue planet heading for our solar system in 1983. Don't give me no crap on this, it's documented in the Washington Post. Crow.
Science was the first instance of open source. If someone else can't freely check your data and replicate your experiments you've got nothing. The raw data and source code for the climate models should have been available from day one. The fact that they weren't and that large quantities of data were "lost" throws the conclusions into serious question.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Translating Freely:
We cooked the data to show what we wanted it to show, then erased the originals to ensure that our version of the truth is the only version.
Those guys really took the lessons from the Ministry of Truth to heart. Way to inspire confidence guys. Way to convince the non-scientific public that there is a reason to quietly submit to a carbon version of a water command empire.
Why is Mr Jones still employed?
The Holy Religion of Obama Worship must not allow dissent. All heretics and apostates must answer to the Lord High Obama and his Czar Chamber. All data that does not fit the predetermined conclusion must be destroyed.
What would be the point of releasing the raw data to the general public? Seriously, why bother? I know that I don't have the skills or expertise to analyse it effectively and come up with any conclusions that have *any* scientific merit. Surely the people who know how to analyse/process this data and draw meaningful conclusions already have access to it.
In the 80's they were getting us all apeshit over a hole in the ozone layer.
In the 70's it was the coming Ice Age.
Each iteration has allowed these Bilderberger manipulators opportunity and experience to refine their forays against reality.
NOAA data is fudged and tampered now:
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/11/yet-more-stuff-we-always-suspected-but-its-nice-to-have-proof.html
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
You might be correct, except that the US is more responsible than China and the UK/Japan are hardly innocent either.
This is less an act of war or one-sided recklessness, and more something akin to a bunch of ignorant fools drinking liquor and shooting their guns into the air not knowing that the rounds will return to the earth and strike them in the head.
(I will pre-empt the 'well the US does it more efficiently than China' responses with an I DON'T GIVE A CRAP because that is like us all sitting in a hot tub and we all kinda poop in it, but I poop the most and then I say "well, I really needed to and it felt better to me")
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
Of course the world is getting warmer. It has been for the last ten thousand years. You know, since the end of the last ice age.
Back then, the polar ice cap extended down into modern-day Illinois. If only we could have stopped global warming from melting the ice cap all the way to what it was 100 years ago.
. . . where it is oh-so-fashionable to deny that humans have anything to do with global warming. Get used to it.
Each American produces over 4 times the CO2 emissions of each Chinese person. (Directly comparing Nations of vastly different populations is absurd; by that standard Jamaica could argue our total emissions should equal theirs).
"it's time we took the money away from the scientists who have been telling us this for years and gave it to the engineers to get us out of this mess."
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
Revive the Constitution.
If the _results_ from the lab in question match up with other independent results, what possible grounds to laymen have to presume the data was deliberately changed? Unless they assume that all independent labs falsified their data in concert, which would be a hell of a conspiracy.
What really bothers me about the complaints around the emails is that none of them (as I understand it) come close to proving that findings were deliberately falsified to point to one conclusion over another. All of the emails were either innocuous or, at worst, ambiguous.
And what have some skeptics done with ambiguous data? They have manipulated it to fit their pre-existing theories. Which is very close to the sort of bad behavior they are charging the lab with now.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Anyone who takes the word of an pseudonymous slashdotter to evaluate statements of truth about the reputation of a news source without proof, loses whatever credibility they had with me, and unlike him/her/it I understand what "poisoning the well" actually means in logic and reason and why its invalid as an argument.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
We have this quote from TFA:
By deleting the raw data, no one can ever reproduce or review the process by which raw data became tested theory.
This is not the act of a scientist; in fact, this would make you fail in the Elementary School Science Fair of your choice. The sad truth seems to be that, while Science concerns itself with discovering truth, these scientists have concerned themselves only with discovering funding and prestige.
Climate change theory must now reside with such things as Cold Fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
why is this modded -1 troll? he points out some honest facts! climate change = anything the climate does, and a carbon tax is a tax on the basic building blocks of all life on the planet.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
--srj/mmv
The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is. This "incident" involves four scientists. Just four. And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really? Thirty five years ago, I used to skate on local lakes...they used to freeze regularly. Those lakes haven't frozen solid for since 1977. Glacial retreat has accelerated since the 1970's...this is undeniable. And this isn't part of the retreat since the last ice age. To assert that the recent glacial melting is somehow part of a linear decline that began 10000 years ago is an absurd claim that can easily be refuted by looking at measures of sea level over the past 10000 years.
The assertions of the contrarians about these emails are irrelevant to the scientific discussion about climate change. They do not address in any real or logical way the arguments of climate change scientists. They are thus, a clear example of the use of the "Red Herring Falacy".
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
How many "lostes" will it take, then?
The real issue that the "climategate" leaks expose is that many of the "scientists" involved are more concerned with promoting their ideology than with finding the facts. It doesn't matter which side of the policy debate you happen to be on - justifying the means because of your support of the ends should never be okay.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Except for the fact that this university is the co-ordinating site for many other centers and many of them got their facts and calculations from CRU. So CRU is about to drag a bunch of other universities down with it.
And the IPCC, too, since they kind of acted as the "gatekeeper" for studies that ended up in the IPCC reports.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
There wont be any more presents from Santa. His house will sink when the ice melts.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
Yeah and the dirt farmers that burn thousands of acres of forest are completely blameless. People are to blame here. Interestingly enough, there is a solution to the people problem...
The solution, of course, is to set up a global despotic government, just as proposed in the Copenhagen protocol. History has shown that tyrannical leaders can kill 10-15% of their populations, and often suffer no repercussions at all. With the NWO proposed by the Copenhagen treaty the new tyrants could do away with a billion or more people, and solve this problem.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You forgot one: Global warming occurs regardless of man.
What then?
Money is the root of all evil?
Then we probably shouldn't compound the issue with CO2?
Absolutely nothing flamebait about that post. Slashdot's moderation system is an epic failure for political issues because moderators can't stand to see a differing opinion that doesn't fit a leftist agenda. As a right-leaning libertarian, my perfectly valid comments have been modded down so many times that I never even get moderation points on this account anymore.
It's a pretty nice ploy by leftists to shut everyone else up, really. They know that non-leftists tend to respect free speech, and won't mod them into oblivion, but they aren't so honorable when they have the mod points.
I remember reading a series of comments in someone's journal about how the participants in the conversation had been around for so long and knew all the tricks that they could bury this guy they didn't like. Moderation abuse isn't a misunderstanding of the moderation system, it's a weapon that its practitioners wield to the detriment of honest and lively discussion.
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
--srj/mmv
No one disagrees that the earth's climate varies a great deal over any long period of time you care to look at. The question is, if the world is warming at the moment (and over a scale of tens of years, it is), then is this due to man-made causes, and is it happening far faster then it could due purely to natural causes? Furthermore, if the temperature is pushed up, will the effects become decidedly non-linear, in that the processes that regulate climate will themselves change and some (quite different ) equilibrium become the norm? The modeling and experimentation suggests that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have a warming effect, though how CO2 interacts with the various climate regulatory and feedback processes is extremely complicated and there's a great deal of work to do. The further question of altering the equilibrium state of the climate (which could be utterly disastrous for civilization, and a great many current species of life on this planet) is even trickier to answer, but there's plenty of good evidence to suggest this could happen (including in the geological record, so we know it is possible).
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.
Naturally the federal government will get to define "previously-unlocked." I am sure it will be a sensible definition that is logical, true to the science, and fair in every way, one that won't favor any particular interest groups or large financial interests. Because everything else government regulates has turned out this way, right?
Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?
When government sees a new excuse for the levy of a tax or the exercise of power, it is not concerned with whether that excuse accurately reflects the actual science. The excuse need not even have a basis in reality, it only needs to be something that average people will believe. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
In those meetings, you spoke up and (politely) corrected those VPs and managers, explaining why their reasoning was oversimplified or wrong, and showed those VPs and managers how their wrong reasoning might be corrected. You did that because as a scientist your primary concern is accurate data and sound reasoning, you recognize that good policies and good decisions are based on these, and all other concerns are subordinate to those two primary concerns. Right?
these idiots talk about carbon and not carbon dioxide? Does carbon monoxide warm the planet too? Or can we ignore chemistry and this is only about carbon? Ban pencils! I told one friend who is freaked about global warming to give up his soda pop. He said no:)
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Why worry about the scientific community? Just start building power plants or what not.
And each American produces almost 8 times the GNP of their Chinese counterpart. So by that standard, each Chinese produces about TWICE the CO2 per unit of economic output as his American counterpart. China needs to clean up its act.
The text you quote says
"Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don't stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the "divergence problem" if you need to. Don't cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)"
Whoever wrote that described truncating the graphic as 'misleading', not fradulent or sinister. The author also implicitly agreed with the premise of questioning the data, at least, by suggesting that the data in question be commented on for clarification.
The divergence problem itself is explained here - in short, tree-ring data used is used as a proxy for temperature but data for North America 'diverges' from other readings around the middle of the 20th century. And though I have no idea how reliable that blog is, it seems like it is the same issue referred to in this article in The Economist, where that (sober and well informed) newspaper states
Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU's director: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that "The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward." The "hiding" concerned the decision to leave out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister.
Got anything else?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
It seems there's a concerted campaign by certain political groups - especially USA political groups - to push the meme that this is a "scandal". But there is no scandal because the stolen emails don't invalidate the science.
They can't attack the science, so they attack the scientists. The science has been peer reviewed, independently verified, and the predictions made by CRU have already come to pass. The science is robust. So all they can do is attack the scientists.
This is a smear campaign, conducted by political screechers with a clearly visible agenda.
Of course the shift in language is a PR exercise. That's because when you are trying to tell the world some important information, use of language is important. It's called nuance. Public Relations is just that - relating information to the public at large. If you discover that the language you are using is not getting the message across, then you have to alter the language to succeed. Otherwise you simply get drowned out by people who are betting at language, but not necessarily better at science.
But by resorting to PR stunts, they've lost much of their credibility as an objective scientist. I now have to look at them, and instead of thinking about what they're saying, try to see through the spin to figure out what they are REALLY saying. I can understand why they're doing it, but it's a bad move; it will come back to bite them. Once it becomes evident they're spinning, even for a 'good cause', every statement they make becomes suspect.
Who cares if it's good or bad science? Parties are taking sides for the fun of taking sides. But there is no science yet that can tell us that by spending $100T over 50 years we can lower the global temperature by a tenth of a degree. Those saying we should make sacrifices are irresponsible if they can't assure us of any beneficial outcome.
OK a new size TV
"So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?"
No, he is saying that the question of whether AGW is real has been reasearched for over 100yrs, culimanating with two decades spent on what is probably the largest scientific effort ever undertaken by mankind. He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
Giving money to the engineers to fix the mess and avoid pumping another half a trillion tons into the atmosphere over the next 40yrs is exactly what every respected scientific institution on the planet has been loudly advocating for at least a decade. Some institutions such as the US National Acedemy of Science (NAS) have been warning their government about the OBSERVED problem since the 1950's
But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong. No matter how unlikely that possibility is you can still use the philosophical point to engage in wishfull thinking and prey that an oppressed genius will emerge from his basement and demonstrate why every physicist since Fourier (circa 1824) has been mistaken about the physical properties of CO2. Regardless of philosophy that position is not rational, let alone scientific.
In short the only people calling for more reasearch on the basic question of whether humans are effecting the climate are vested interest who want to delay action and the ignorant who lap up thier anti-science propoganda.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> The problem is that in this field there aren't thousands of other researchers.
Yes, there are in fact.
"People from over 130 countries contributed to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report over the previous 6 years. These people included more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers, more than 800 contributing authors, and more than 450 lead authors."
No matter how you argue the numbers, there are way too many for a conspiracy.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand.
Your description of sceptics is right for some sceptics, but not for many. Sceptics are well aware that climate is the long term trends in weather. Sceptics know that you can't take one cold year as evidence, so they are amused when they watch climate change activists advocate one bad hurricane as an "example" of what climate change will bring (and some activists even go so far as to say the hurricane was likely caused by global warming.) Climate change activists are also quite vocal about "record" temperature years, even though one year does not a trend make. But let's leave that aside as a minor issue.
The bigger issue is that climate is at the minimum a 15 to 30 year trend. Sceptics know this. And you know what that means? It means the models and the hypothesis cannot be demonstrated to be consistent with observations unless we wait another 30 years. Notice the recent decade has been more or less flat or just not warmed enough, and we are expected to ignore that because 10 years is still short of 15 to 30 years. Fine. I am happy to wait 30 years to know whether the hypothesis is consistent with observations. Just don't claim the hypothesis is already proven beyond reasonable doubt.
And if you feel the need to say, "but by then it will be too late", then fine, I am happy to listen to people say "we have a speculation based on the data gathered so far, about the climate where we think it could lead to disaster sometime in the future--we can't prove it, it might be right or wrong, but we need y'all to pay attention, and you need to fund this thing more so we can gather much more data and do a real engineering-quality study with checks and counterchecks".
I used to believe global warming 100% until I heard them start saying that they were virtually certain, for all practical purposes, about their 50 and 100 year "scenarios" (predictions) about climate. Most predictions by experts have a high likelihood of being wrong, unless they have been made using an empirical study of the kinds of things that lead to good predictions. Empirically, being an expert in the field tends to make your prediction less likely to be true, due to bias of overconfidence in being an expert. There are ways round that, but sitting in your ivory tower shouting "But I'm the expert!!" is not one of them.
And predictions from models are not facts either.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
So, if you make more junk, you get to destroy the environment for anyone else? That's pretty strange logic. It's ok that I'm dumping chemicals in your water table, because I'm making a really big TV. It's ok that I'm acidifying the seas, because I'm doing it to make myself a really expensive SUV.
Perhaps you should develop an economy that isn't based on pollution. If you can't do that, then maybe your capitalist model is flawed.
If carbon dioxide increases global temperature, did carbon dioxide stop increasing since 1998?
Why did global warming seemingly stopped if carbon dioxide increase did not seemingly stop? Are the two related? Are they unrelated? What causes changes in global temperature? How much does human activity factor in?
If 2005 was the warmest year on record, how does the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere relate to the prior years and the later years? Were there more carbon dioxide or less?
If the global temperature moves in directions different than the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what conclusions should we draw?
I'm a complete layman and haven't been paying attention to the science at all. You seem pretty clued in. Clue me in.
It just happened to stop reflecting temperature for one period for reasons unknown, a period where we had thermometer records to check against. But you know, we will continue to assume (for reasons unknown) that the series reflects temperature back in time, in those periods where we don't have thermometer temperatures to check against. Riiiight.
Put it to you this way. You make 10 predictions. 5 of them come true, and 5 turn out false. You now hide the 5 that came out false. You present the 5 that came true as your original 5 predictions, and everyone believes you got it right 100% of the time. Your predictions are therefore highly reliable. A sceptic comes along and steals your private notebook. Therein he finds not just the 5 predictions that came true, but the whole 10 including the 5 you got wrong. You now appear to be someone who gets it right only 50% of the time (ie. like any naive unskilled person would). When questioned, you and your buddies say, in respectable sounding academic language, "it would have been inappropriate to show all 10 predictions." Riiiight.
Those climate 'scientists', to be responsible, should be telling us not to take a single step until they can generate the scientific models to assure us that if, for example, we invested $100T over 50 years we would lower the temperature even a tenth of a degree.
You're just wrong here, Steve, on two levels.
One is that you're forgetting that "not to decide is to decide." Everyone knows the predictive models are inexact. Even over the past ten years or so, we've seen the best scientific predictions proved wrong -- global warming is getting much worse, much faster, than the consensus belief in 1999.
Waiting for an arbitrary standard of scientific certainty before changing any behavior is an option the world has, one option among many: the "continue as before" option. What we do know is that that leads to disaster. We may not be able to say exactly when which exact magnitude of disaster will arrive, but it is known to be a catastrophe of global proportions.
And we may not be able to know the ideal time to begin acting for optimum return on our economic sacrifice, but it's pretty clearly in the past: beginning global greenhouse-gas reduction efforts ten years ago would have been better than, say, now.
The other level you're wrong at is that it's scientists' job to give us information about our options. Refusing to tell us that the status quo leads to catastrophe until predictive abilities reach an arbitrary threshold of certainty would be a breach of scientific responsibility. And pretty amoral too, it'd take a Guild of Evil Scientist level of inhumanity to know about impending world destruction and swear a pact not to say anything.
Suppose the approaching danger were instead an archipelago of asteroids whose orbit will approximately intersect the earth in a hundred years. The scientists don't know whether the really big rocks will hit the earth but some of the medium-size ones probably will. They don't have any plans for deflecting them or taking earthbound steps to handle the catastrophe. But shouldn't they tell us what they know? And, as fellow human beings, wouldn't they recommend that the world take the best known course of action at the best possible time?
He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
That's a conclusion*, not an observation. In the context of scientific research, observations are measurements; while there is a general usage of the word meaning "remark", it's unhelpful to use it in this context.
* Or an assertion without evidence, but I'm giving benefit of the doubt.
has nothing to do with global warming. It has to do (in at least my opinion) people making the wrong decision about what is right.
Basically you have some SCIENTISTS arguing that this research and information should NOT be available to the public, as they feel they are the only ones qualified to understand it.
Essentially, they want to avoid having to spend time defending their conclusions from people they view as biased or crackpots.
To my mind this is wrong on so many levels I find it hard to contemplate. I understand their frustration, and I sympathize, however this type of behavior is wrong.
First the arrogance to think, that only they know better than anyone else, it is just mind shattering. Sure they have specialized training that enables them to use this information likely better than most, but that is not to say that nobody else cannot reason for themselves.
Secondly, if they cannot defend their conclusions or their postulations from a bunch of biased crackpots, then they need to work harder at formulating concrete analysis and conclusions, and stop being lazy by saying "oh they are just crazy, it is a waste of time to defend MY theories". I am sorry, its called scientific method. Prove your shit, and defend it you bums.
Thirdly, if trying to build confidence in your cause and support for your conclusions, promoting an air of secrecy is not the way to do it. Science should be done in a transparent manner. You know, so your findings can be replicated, and your conclusions tested by others.
Anyway their simple lack of common sense here disturbing.
But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong.
No, this is politics. Science requires an extremely high level of proof and always retains an element of doubt because it is just about finding the truth. Politics, on the other hand, requires making decisions now about what to do. Based on the evidence currently available regarding the probabilities of various outcomes and the associated costs of those outcomes, reducing CO2 emissions is clearly the right thing to do. Yes, there's a small chance that it's a waste of time and there's a cost associated with that but there's a much higher probability that it will help avoid the very high costs associated with rapid global temperature rises.
I get so sick of hearing people use the 0.01% chance that the consensus on climate change is wrong as an excuse to disagree with the overwhelming evidence. It's as if it's a matter of religious choice - as if people should be allowed to believe whatever they want. Sure they can believe what they want but when they try to spread their beliefs or let their beliefs influence public policy, we'll be there saying how very wrong they are, as loudly as we can, while waving the mountain of evidence in their face.
"Man it's a good thing the earth is only billions of years old, or the 100+ years of scientific research might just seem insignificant in comparison."
Man it's a good thing that reasearch over the last hundered years has convinced you that the Earth is billions of years old.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So they said they would delete the data rather than give it up. And the said they would hide behind non-disclosure agreements so they wouldn't have to give up the data. And they said they got other universities and government agencies to go along with hiding the data. But you think we should still give them the benefit of the doubt and believe their story that they just accidentally lost the data.
because when you are trying to tell the world some important information, use of language is important. It's called nuance
... even as "developing" economies that are actually far more massive are being given a pass while they carry on as if nobody on the planet has learned anything since 1960.
It can also be called "oily hucksterism" or "lying" or "spinning" etc.
We're talking about a movement that wants to re-arrange trillions of dollars of productivity by reallocating its output. We're talking about a movement that's prepared to wildly punish western economies that are doing more than any culture in human history to re-invent how they use energy, recycle materials, transport people and goods
Yes, it takes some real PR to make a kid matriculate from elementary school thoroughly in the grips of this new brand of Original Sin, and seeking salvation for it by cutting giant new polluting economies a whole lot of perpetual slack. Guys like Al Gore have cleverly positioned themselves to make billions off of that well-packaged guilt and fear trip, and it's well-nuanced PR that got him there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
AFAIK all countries in IPCC voted on a range of existing scenarios modelling our current and future CO2 output to find a "consensus" middle ground. All this means is that maybe, some of the more extreme, "ohmygodwe'reallgoingtodie" scenarios, e.g. A2 instead of A1B or B1, was a better predictor of the data.
Quite the contrary. People are entitled to their own opinion AND entitled to challenge what others claim as facts including but not limited to the quality and veracity of the raw data.
global warming is getting much worse, much faster, than the consensus belief in 1999.
The hockey stick model that was the consensus belief back in 1999 and has been proven wrong there has been a decline in average global temp since 1999. The problem is that if there is a critical GW problem what will it take to avoid it, will carbon taxes that would demolish the economy fix it, or must more be done at a greater cost. Is the cure more harmful than the problem? If the sky is truly falling I have no problem with the radical steps proposed but I have YET to see any data that would suggest that radical steps must be taken in order to avoid a catastrophe.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions?
Without giving my stance on the issue at hand, I would like to point out that people with Ph.D's also notice where the grant money is. Just because they've spent a lot of time in school does not make them saints. A Ph.D does not mean you automatically get to have your opinion respected.
I saw it! It was on TV!
You need a re-introduction to the Socratic definition of "knowledge".
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell